Companies often have fairly specific questions they would like to have answered. Often, they are willing to pay some amount of money to get the answer rapidly from someone outside the company instead of having to research the issue using employees of the company. This is often true because the expense, in engineering time, is greater than the cost of hiring a consultant who knows the answer already.
However, in practice, a number of problems arise which make it impractical to hire outside consultants. First, the transaction costs of getting a consultant are much too large for most practical questions. The customer typically has to spend time researching the available consultants (e.g., reading a consultants' directory) which often takes more time than simply researching the answer to the question, and the customer and the consultant have to agree on a contract (again, not really worth doing for a job that might cost $100).
A second problem is that appropriate consultants may often be in other countries than the one where the customer is located. Using traditional approaches would involve the overhead of getting a work permit and/or international fund transfers which again would be more trouble than its worth for a small transaction.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a method and system to minimize transaction costs by using the World Wide Web ("the web") to match customers with questions to consultants with answers.
A third problem is that the customer is not anonymous. Sometimes, just knowing that a certain company has a certain question can give insights into their future strategy. Consultants normally work under a confidentiality agreement, but by providing complete anonymity, embodiments of the present invention work better than solutions used in the prior art.